Death Takes a Gander (7 page)

“How much water is that?” Cecilia asked.

“About a third of a cup.”

Harry inserted the end of the syringe into the tubing and started to squeeze. The goose struggled.

“Real slow!” warned Eric. He watched a moment. “Once he’s done, he applies a little suction to bring up the stomach contents.”

“Sort of like syphoning gas,” Teddy said.

“You’ve got it,” Eric said. “Next it’s Lark’s job to make sure the effluent drains over the screen into the collection bucket. Meanwhile, Teddy’s watching for signs of stress and/or aspiration of fluids. And that’s it. The process is repeated.”

“How many times?” Andrew asked.

“As many times as possible. The object is to flush clear liquid.”

“What happens then?” Cecilia asked.

“We put the bird back and get the next one,” Eric jerked his thumb toward the main barn area. “In the meantime, Lark drains the collection bucket and delivers the screen contents to Dorothy, whose job is to sift, sort, and bag any lead found. After that, the bags are tagged with the ID number of the bird, and the process starts over. Any questions?”

Lark was having trouble listening. Harry had begun the lavage, and effluent poured out of the tubing. Hard particles mixed with green vegetation plunked onto the screen, plugging the holes. The fluid backed up, pouring effluent onto her jeans and the floor. “Yuck.”

“Clean the screen off,” Eric said.

Lark scraped the solids to the edges. More effluent came, and, in between gushes, she filled syringes with water.

The goose choked.

Teddy panicked and stretched out her neck. “Lift her butt higher, Junior. Lift her up!”

Junior complied, grunting as he repositioned the struggling goose.

Lark glanced at Harry. “Maybe we should stop?”

“Nah,” Teddy said, shaking his head. “She’s okay. I say we do one more round.”

Junior shrugged. Even if his muscles ached, Lark doubted he would have admitted he needed a break.

Harry grabbed another syringe. “You ready, Lark?”

“Go.”

The last syringeful of water produced mostly clear liquid. Harry removed the tubing. Junior tipped the goose upright and slid off the stool.

“Here, I’ll take her,” Eric said, coming up behind and reaching for the bird.

Junior handed her off, then shook out his arms.

“Two things,” Eric said. “We need to be sure to mark the collection bucket with the goose’s number.”

Oops
, she had missed that part. Lark reached for a piece of masking tape, marked the bucket, then stood. Her jeans—spattered with the stomach contents of the goose—were hitched up, and she plucked at them with wary fingers. One glance at Junior showed he, too, had suffered. Bright green dung streaked the lower half of his jeans and covered his right boot.

“Second,” Lark said. “Note that the person holding the goose and the person collecting the effluent have the messiest jobs.”

Everyone but Junior laughed.

“And third,” Eric said, giving Lark her due. “If we had the chelating agent on hand, we would administer it now. Unfortunately, we’re still waiting for the drugs.”

Cecilia flashed her hand in the air. “What if a goose is too weak for lavage? How do we treat it?”

“All we can do is give them the chelating agent and hope it helps.”

“What about taking blood lead levels?” Andrew asked.

Lark could see Eric was exasperated.

“It’s way too expensive,” she said.

Eric nodded. “Once we locate a mobile X-ray unit, we’ll start taking radiographs to determine how much lead is in each bird’s system. Once the lead is cleared, treatment will be discontinued for ten days, and we’ll start doing blood work.”

“So, what you’re saying is, you’ll only run tests once you know a bird will survive?” Andrew said.

Even the birds fell silent, as if awaiting the answer.

“Ja.”

In the additional silence, Lark picked up the bucket.

“It’s the best we can do,” she said. “Now let’s get to work.”

After Eric had left with the goose, Lark dumped the fluid in the sink and handed the screen to Dorothy. The older woman picked up a pair of tweezers, bent her head over the magnifying lamp, and worried the stomach contents around on the screen.

“Here we go!” she exclaimed triumphantly, plucking several small nodules from the partially digested matter and holding them up. “The geese used it as grit.” Then Dorothy tossed the plant matter into the trash, dropped the lead pieces into a baggy marked with the date and the bird’s ID number, and logged in the data.

“Lark, are you about ready?” Harry yelled.

She turned to see him waiting with another bird. Reclaiming the screen, she glanced up at the clock. It was nearly noon.

At last count there were eighty-five geese left to treat—take away the ones that had recently died. At twenty minutes per bird, divided by three, they would be here well into the night. Fatigue settled around her shoulders, and her arms drooped like the wings of the geese.

When she dropped to her knees beside Harry, the biologist asked, “What did you find?”

“Lead sinkers, like we expected,” she answered.

“Did they look corroded?” His intensity surprised her. She tried picturing them in her mind.

“Not really. Why?”

“Something’s off.” Using a knuckle, Harry pushed his glasses up on his nose. “Lead needs time to be absorbed in the bloodstream.”

Obviously
.

Her expression must have said she had thought as much, for he pushed on.

“Don’t you see? It takes a couple of days for sinkers to erode and leach enough lead into the bird’s system to cause poisoning. It wouldn’t happen overnight.”

Lark slapped a piece of tubing into his hand. “They’ve been fishing the lake for a month, Harry. Maybe the geese picked some up earlier?”

“Then we should be seeing signs of
chronic
lead poisoning—more weight loss, that sort of thing. These birds were healthy until very recently.”

She couldn’t disagree with him there.

“Plus, someone would have noticed this number of birds on the ice.”

He had a point.

“Maybe someone did,” she said. “I’ll ask around.”

Harry dug in his pocket, then dropped a tiny lead sinker into her hand. “Feel this.”

She rolled the small object between her thumb and index finger. “Okay?”

“Notice how smooth and round it is.”

“It’s similar to what we found on the ice.”

“That’s my point. A partially digested sinker, one left in a bird’s system long enough to leach lead, wouldn’t feel like that. It would be distorted… just a blob… if there was anything left at all.”

Lark rested her hands on the edges of the bucket. “What are you saying, Harry?”

“I’m saying it’s not the fishing sinkers that are making the birds sick.”

“Then what is?” Angela
asked, walking in on the tail end of the conversation. She was interested in hearing his theory. On her lunch break, she’d spoken with Kramner and told him about finding the fishing sinkers scattered on the ice. He had told her in no uncertain terms
not
to pursue an investigation. As far as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was concerned, the matter was closed. But if something else was making them sick, maybe he’d reconsider.

Lark glanced up. “How’s the fishing?”

“It bites.” She thought of Frakus and his insistence she challenge the little boy’s catch.

Harry chuckled.

“I came to pick up my truck and to see how things were going.”

She leaned closer to watch the lavage procedure. “Seriously, Harry, I’m interested in hearing your theory. Maybe if… ”

She broke off, unsure what she was looking for. She needed something with far-reaching consequences. “Maybe if I had a bone to throw him, I could convince Kramner to let me investigate.”

Harry stuck out his hand for another syringe. Lark handed him one, and he jammed the snout into the tubing. “I don’t know what’s making them sick. I only know it can’t be the sinkers. It doesn’t make sense.”

“Except there was enough lead on the ice to wipe out the entire Hi-Line population.” A stream of effluent gushed from the tubing, and Angela pulled back.

Lark guided the flow over the screen. Several fishing sinkers were visible, snagged among the plant matter.

“Angela’s right,” Lark said. “It wasn’t there by accident. There was too much of it. Like I said, maybe the geese picked it up earlier.”

Harry shook his head. “If there had been lead on the ice the day before, Frakus would have noticed. They set up the concession area the night before.”

“Maybe he’s the one who scattered it,” Dorothy said.

“Why would he do that?” Angela asked, trying to reconcile her image of Frakus with the image of someone scattering lead on the ice. The merger failed.

“Because he hates geese,” answered Cecilia.

“Join the club,” Junior said, scooting his chair forward for a better position. “There’re lots of people who ain’t too fond of ’em.”

“Aren’t,” Dorothy corrected, obviously letting the front of the sentence go.

Junior ignored her. “What about Brett Bemster?”

Where had Angela heard that name?

“Who’s he?” she asked.

Junior’s look tagged her a moron. “He’s the golf pro.”

She should have guessed.

“Brett runs the Elk Lake Municipal Golf Course,” Lark explained. “Last year, Bernie Crandall ticketed him for bludgeoning a goose on the seventh hole. The bird lived. Brett was fined. After that, he hired Lou Vitti.”

That name she recognized. “The guy with the dogs, right?”

“Right on,” Junior said.

She had redeemed herself.

“Talk about a sweet deal,” the cowboy said. “Elk Park paid the dude five thousand dollars to get rid of them birds, and all he ever did was walk his dogs.”

“
Those
birds,” corrected Dorothy.

“Heck, I’d’ve gone out and chased off them dang geese for half that.”

“Those.”

“Them.”

“Those.”

“And the town paid for it?” Angela asked.

“It came out of the parks and rec budget,” Lark said.

Dorothy sifted a screen of effluent under the light. “Vitti didn’t stop with the dogs. He also put out fake owls and Mylar balloons. EPOCH put a stop to that.”

“How so?”

“We filed a protest with the town council,” Cecilia said.

“The golf course borders the Paris Mills Memorial Bird Sanctuary,” Lark explained. “Vitti and his tactics were scaring away all the birds.”

Harry passed the end of the tubing to Lark, then swiveled around on his chair. “The point is, neither of those guys would have sabotaged the tournament.”

Angela kneaded the muscles at the base of her skull with her fingers. How would Ian have worked the problem?

He would have looked at all possible scenarios. “Unless one of them thought the geese would eat the lead and fly off to die somewhere else.”

“Like mice who eat rat poison,” Cecilia said. “First they eat the bait, then they look for water, then they die.”

“Yuck,” Dorothy said.

But it stood to reason. Victims of lead poisoning drank excessive amounts of fluid. Angela could see everyone’s mind working.

“I agree with Harry,” Eric said, finally logging in his opinion. “Frakus would never take the chance of messing up the fishing.”

In truth, Angela agreed with him. From day one, Frakus had been intent on making the ice fishing jamboree a success.

“What else could it be?” Lark asked.

Angela stepped around Lark and the bucket, trying to get a different perspective on the bird. “Maybe the target wasn’t the geese. Maybe someone wanted the fishing event to fail.”

“Oh my.” Cecilia’s hands moved from her bucket to her throat, and her fingers fussed with her collar. “That would make us suspects.”

Angela assumed she meant EPOCH.

“How so?”

“Things got a wee bit contentious between the bird club and Frakus when the idea for the tournament came up,” Dorothy said.

Cecilia nodded. “He wanted to open an access to the ice through the Paris Mills Bird Sanctuary.”

“Obviously, he lost the battle,” Lark said.

The goose gagged.

“Maybe so,” Angela said, “but it’s possible he won the war.”

“Well, looky here,” Dorothy said, holding up a minuscule object with a pair of tweezers.

Angela crossed to her station. “What is it?”

“It looks like a piece of lead shot.”

Dorothy moved her head and let Angela peer through the magnified light. The pellet was tiny. It would have been easy to miss.

“Are there any more?”

Dorothy picked through the vegetation. “Lots.” She reached for a Ziploc bag. “One, two, three… ”

Her voice trailed off. Angela kept count in her head.

Finally, Dorothy dropped the last piece into the bag and announced, “Sixty-four.”

Harry whistled. “Is that the first lead shot you’ve found?”

“Yes, but it’s only goose number three.”

Pinching closed the seal on the Ziploc, Angela studied the tiny beads rolling back and forth at the bottom of the bag. “Do you know what this means?”

Nobody answered.

“If the other birds have ingested lead shot, we’ve widened the search area.” She handed the sample back to Dorothy and turned to Junior. “Is there any hunting around the lake?”

“No, ma’am.”

“What about places to shoot skeet?” More than likely, with as many birds as were sick, it was a trap-shooting range that was the source of the shot.

“Nope.”

The rest of the EPOCH volunteers concurred.

Angela wondered if the shot alone was enough to get Kramner to approve a necropsy of the bird. There was only one way to find out.

Excusing herself, she stepped into the main area of the barn. Standing against the wall, she dug out her cell phone.

“We’ve got a new development,” she said, filling him in on the discovery of the shot. When she finished, the silence hung heavy on his side of the line.

Finally, he spoke. “How long have you been out in the sun, Dimato? We’ve been over this ground. U.S. Fish and Wildlife considers these resident geese.”

“But the presence of shot indicates that a possible source of danger to other waterfowl exists.” Her mind flashed on the swan at Barr Lake. Whatever had happened to the bird? She didn’t remember much after finding Ian.

“Fine. You locate another species who’s been harmed by your source, and I’ll reconsider.”

That’s it!
If memory served, there were six recognizable subspecies of Canada geese, of which only two wintered in Colorado. They flew in from the north and augmented the year-round populations on the plains. There was bound to be one or two of them in the flock.

“What if I can prove some of the poisoned flock are migrating birds?”

“You do understand, migratory doesn’t mean flying back and forth from the Front Range to Elk Park?”

Unable to think of an appropriate comeback, she got right to the point. “I’ll grant, some of the geese are members of the Hi-Line population. But if I can prove some of them are migrating, can I have my necropsy?”

He sighed, and she waited for him to speak. “You don’t give up, do you?”

“No.”
You might as well cave
. “My folks even considered changing my middle name to Perseverance.”

He chuckled. “Okay, Angela P. Dimato, you win. You find a migratory subspecies in the bunch, and you can autopsy the bird.”

Excitement caused her to dance back and forth on her feet. “Thank you, sir.”

“Hey, Dimato.”

She didn’t like the way he punched out her name. “Sir?”

“For the record, I’m giving you authorization in order to document the lead poisoning,
but
you are not to open an official investigation. I expect you to report back to me with the findings.”

“I understand, sir.”

“In the meantime, you are to continue to monitor the fishing licenses at the lake. And stay out of John Frakus’s way.”

Angela wondered if Frakus had complained about her.

“Are you hearing me?” barked Kramner.

“Yes, sir.”

Angela slapped the phone shut and raised her arms in the air. Official or not, she’d been granted an investigation. She intended to do a good job.

Now came the hard part, separating the northern migratory subspecies from the flock.

“Good news,” she said, returning to the lavage area. “We’ve got the okay to do a necropsy, provided we can isolate a migratory subspecies to perform the autopsy on.”

“Were any of the geese banded?” Lark asked. “That would be an easy way to tell.”

They all looked to Dorothy. If one of the geese sported a band from a station up north, the proof was in the record books.

Dorothy flipped through the log she was keeping, then shook her head. “Not unless some of the dead birds are. We didn’t check the dead ones in.”

“What about measurements?” Harry asked.

“He’s right,” Andrew said. “Size is the only accurate way to differentiate between the subspecies.”

Dorothy snorted. “We didn’t have time.”

“Then let’s make time,” Angela said.

Even to herself, she sounded too much like her mother. Lark must have thought so too.

“Maybe
you
should make time,” she said, scowling as a stream of effluent missed the bucket, coating her pant leg. “In case you haven’t noticed, we’re all a little busy here.”

Angela chalked the sarcasm up to the fact they were all stretched a bit thin. “Do you have a tape measure?”

“Do I look like I have a tape measure?”

“Then does anyone have any idea where I could find one?”

Angela hated to press, but she needed to get back to the lake. It didn’t leave her much time.

Eric came to her rescue. “Try the desk in the office. Third drawer down.”

She signaled her thanks and slipped out the door. She was glad to get away from the crush of bodies. Too many people jammed in one room made her claustrophobic, not to mention the smell of goose vomit, wet feathers, and sweat.

It was something she and Ian had shared in common. He hated crowds, preferring the solitude of an investigation, the isolation of the hunt. He’d been furious when Kramner had saddled him with her as a partner.

Not that she blamed him. It had to be hard to be forced to train her—a kid straight out of college, albeit one with a master’s degree—to take over a job he’d been doing for forty years. Had she been in his shoes, it would have ticked her off too.

The worse part was, while she knew the latest in theory, in the field she had let him down. Hard.

A cold draft swept the hall, and the hairs on the back of her neck stiffened.

“Sorry,” she whispered.

Except for furniture and mounds of paperwork, the office was empty. The clutter didn’t faze her. It didn’t compare to the mess on Ian’s desk.

Kicking shut the door, she sat behind the desk and breathed in the quiet. The room smelled of wood, leather, and aging books. A large oak desk dominated the center space. Leather-bound chairs squared off on both sides. To her right, a built-in bookcase, crammed with notebooks, lined the inside wall. To her left, a bank of windows looked out toward Twin Owls. The only surprise was the small, framed picture of Lark parked next to the phone.

Angela picked up the photograph and studied the woman’s face. She was smiling. Laugh lines crinkled the corners of her dark brown eyes. Her blond hair was pulled back and braided.

How had she missed the connection between Lark and Eric?

Angela set down the frame. Locating the tape measure, she found a flat package scale on top of the filing cabinets and pulled
The Sibley Guide to Birds
off the bookshelf. She needed to check the stats on the birds. The common Canada goose—the resident variety—weighed around ten pounds with a wingspan of sixty inches. The lesser Canada goose was smaller, maxing out at six pounds, and the Richardson’s was smaller still.

Using the figures as benchmarks, she headed to the main barn and started in on the geese. An hour later, she had the results. By her estimations, sixty-three percent of the birds were local, the rest were migrants.

“Guess what?” she said, returning to the lavage room. “We have migrants.”

The EPOCH members cheered.

“Can you take a bird down tonight?” Eric asked.

Angela shook her head. “I’ve been assigned to the Ice Fishing Jamboree for the weekend. I’m bunking at the Drummond through Sunday. Besides, it’s a holiday. The Wildlife lab is closed until Tuesday.”

“George Covyduck could do it up here,” Lark said. She and Eric exchanged glances.

Why not?
thought Angela. It would give them some quicker answers. She considered checking with Kramner, then decided against it. She had permission, and he’d never specified which lab to use.

“Can you arrange it?” she asked.

Eric bobbed his head. “Consider it done.”

The job of selecting a bird fell to Angela. Unable to leave the bodies of the dead geese outside for fear of scavengers, volunteers had piled the dead birds in an unheated storeroom in the back of the Protective Custody House. A small space with ambient heat from the hall, the room’s smell—a mixture of rotted flesh, wet feathers, and blood—overwhelmed her. Carcasses stretched along the back wall, stacked like cordwood.